Police Judiciaire

The Police Judiciaire is the national criminal-investigation force in France, a large operational network distinct from the comparatively small Sureté Nationale office that oversees several crime branches. Under Max Fernet, it links regional headquarters to hundreds of local police forces and serves as the institutional backbone of the investigation into the Jackal. Its power is considerable, but the pursuit also exposes how much that power depends on identifying a suspect, transmitting information through regular channels, and balancing speed against secrecy.

Structure and jurisdiction

The Police Judiciaire is the force that does the investigative work often mistakenly attributed to the Sureté Nationale. The latter is a small, lightly staffed administrative body with control over five crime branches, not a detective force with investigators of its own. Max Fernet, director of the Police Judiciaire, commands the national detective force and sits alongside the senior officials responsible for the broader security apparatus.

The scale of Fernet’s organization is reflected in its geography. Its headquarters at the Quai des Orfèvres is much larger than the Sureté Nationale headquarters at 11 Rue des Saussaies, near the Ministry of the Interior of France. Beneath the national headquarters are seventeen Services Regionaux headquarters, one for each police district of Metropolitan France. Their network includes 453 local forces: seventy-four Central Commissariats, 253 Constituency Commissariats, and 126 local Postes de Police. Together, these units cover two thousand towns and villages. In 1963, the Police Judiciaire had just over twenty thousand men under Fernet’s command.

Its jurisdiction sits alongside, rather than replaces, the work of other forces. In rural districts and on the highways, the French National Gendarmerie and the Gendarmes Mobiles undertake the more general maintenance of law and order. In some areas, police agents and gendarmes share premises and facilities for efficiency. The result is an extensive but divided system: investigative work, local policing, rural order, and wider security responsibilities are distributed among connected organizations rather than concentrated in a single service.

Relationship to the security apparatus

The Police Judiciaire appears within a larger administrative structure whose other branches hold different kinds of information and authority. The Bureau de Sécurité Publique is chiefly responsible for protecting state buildings, communications, highways, and other state property from sabotage or damage. Renseignements généraux serves as the central records office and the institutional memory of the other branches. DST is responsible for counter-espionage and keeps watch on airports, docks, and borders. CRS is a separate force of forty-five thousand men. These organizations are not interchangeable: each has a defined role, and an investigation may need their cooperation without any one of them possessing the information required to identify a suspect.

The scale of the records held by Renseignements généraux makes that division especially significant. Its archives contain four and a half million personal dossiers on people who have come to the attention of French police forces since their establishment. Cross-indexed along five and a half miles of shelves, the files include people convicted or suspected of crimes, witnesses, and even people acquitted in court. The system is not computerized, yet archivists pride themselves on being able to locate details such as an old village arson or witnesses in an obscure trial within minutes. The archives also hold fingerprints, including unidentified sets, and ten and a half million cards, among them border disembarkation records and hotel registrations from outside Paris. Paris hotel cards go instead to the Prefecture of Police. Before border disembarkation cards reach the archives, DST officers examine them at the point of entry to screen arrivals.

These records give the state many ways to make a person legible, but they do not solve the Jackal’s problem automatically. Until investigators know whom to search for, files, border checks, and police powers cannot be directed effectively. The machinery is extensive; its first requirement is a usable identity.

The Jackal investigation

At a high-level meeting convened to address the threat to the President, Commissaire Maurice Bouvier of the Brigade Criminelle identifies the central obstacle: the OAS does not know the assassin’s identity, so its agents cannot disclose him; the security services cannot intercept, locate, or arrest a man for whom they have no name. Bouvier argues that establishing the name must come before the other proposals and that the work requires detective investigation. Asked who is France’s best detective, he recommends his own deputy, Commissaire Claude Lebel.

Lebel is summoned and receives a directive rather than an invitation to advise. He is given an office, access to necessary information, the resources of the represented departments, and authority to incur costs without limit. He arranges for Inspector Caron to become his combined assistant and secretary, restricts knowledge of the operation, and orders dedicated telephone lines and practical provisions for an office expected to work continuously. These early arrangements show the Police Judiciaire’s role as both an investigative force and a coordinating center: Lebel’s work depends on mobilizing other departments while keeping the reason for their requests concealed.

Lebel also seeks confidential cooperation from senior criminal investigators in other countries, using personal contacts rather than formal inter-force enquiries. Over three hours, he and Caron make calls over scrambled high-frequency lines. Lebel gives his foreign colleagues only a limited description, then explains indirectly that the unknown man must be a political contract assassin with several successful killings behind him. Because he cannot yet disclose the target or treat the request as an ordinary official enquiry, the effort depends on trust between detectives and disciplined control of information.

The national structure is put to work as clues accumulate. When records show that Alexander James Quentin Duggan entered France from Brussels on July 22 and left for Brussels on July 31, investigators find a matching hotel card for a stay near the Place de la Madeleine. Lebel chooses a discreet visit to the hotel proprietor over an immediate raid, learning that the suspect had left by August 15. Later, a report that Duggan registered at the Hotel du Cerf in Gap arrives at the Police Judiciaire only after the Jackal has already left. Lebel explains that the registration card followed the normal route to regional headquarters in Lyon, where it was recognized as relevant; announcing a nationwide alert sooner could have exposed the secret investigation to the press.

Operational reach and procedural limits

Once the information indicates that the Jackal may return to Gap, local police establish steel roadblocks on exits from the town and around the hotel, while armed teams assemble at Grenoble and Lyon and a helicopter is prepared at Satory Camp for Lebel’s flight. The response demonstrates the organization’s ability to draw on regional forces and coordinate rapid deployments. It also arrives too late to trap a suspect who has already moved on, illustrating the difference between mobilizing resources and having timely, actionable information.

Lebel defends the decision not to issue a broad alert to every rural gendarmerie. The President’s instruction that the affair remain secret prevented the kind of public, nationwide search that might have warned the Jackal. The delay in recognizing the Gap hotel card was, in his account, a consequence of preserving that secrecy. He orders that the white Alfa Romeo be reported immediately as stolen, but that no lone policeman approach its occupant, since the suspect is dangerous and a premature interception could alert him or cause further harm. In this way, procedure is not merely a constraint imposed on the hunt; it is also a means of managing the risks created by an armed fugitive.

After the car is found near Ussel, Lebel directs a square search centered on the discovery site. He asks Commissaire Valentin at Clermont-Ferrand to send the best available team and make inquiries at farms, shops, cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ shelters. The searchers are given a practical description of the fugitive, including his appearance, English birth, fluent French, luggage, money, and likely dishevelled condition. To keep local reporters away, Valentin is told to present the effort as a search for someone wandering after a car accident and to keep the press from detecting the real purpose. If the suspect is found, the police are to surround and contain him rather than approach.

Lebel uses the sequence of clues to revise his account of the escape. The Jackal’s rapid departure from Gap and the transformed car lead him to infer that the suspect bought paint there and was tipped off that the Duggan identity had been discovered. He cannot say that the leak came from within the meeting: orders passed through switchboard and telex operators and junior staff could also have been compromised. His suspicion turns toward Valmy, the Jackal’s known contact, but he presents the leak as a developing inference, not a proven fact. Later, he recognizes that the Jackal’s week of apparent inactivity after entering France may mean he has selected a particular day for the assassination. The Police Judiciaire’s pursuit thus advances through a combination of archives, reporting, field searches, and inference, while each new conclusion remains subject to uncertainty.

The organization’s most visible strength is its reach: more than twenty thousand personnel, regional command, local forces, and access to information held across the state’s security system. Its vulnerability is not simply a shortage of resources but the friction between branches, the time taken for routine records to travel, and the danger that wider circulation will betray the investigation. Through Lebel’s work, the Police Judiciaire is portrayed not as a single detective’s instrument but as a network whose effectiveness depends on precise coordination—and whose procedural delays become part of the contest with an adversary moving under assumed identities.